Investigation finds ~70 “creepshot” Tumblr blogs including one with ~11K followers and 53K+ interactions; Tumblr hasn't removed any blogs found in investigation
After Reddit famously banned the creepshots sub-reddit, which shared non-consensual, revealing photos of women … Tweets: @cindygallop , @josephfcox , @josephfcox , @josephfcox , @josephfcox , @josephfcox , @josephfcox , and @josephfcox Tweets: Cindy Gallop / @cindygallop : When white men who don't experience abuse and harassment start up tech social platforms, they don't design abuse and harassment out of them from the get go. Which is why Tumblr Has A Major Creepshots Problem @josephfcox @motherboard @tumblr http://motherboard.vice.com/ ... #diversity Joseph Cox / @josephfcox : New: Tumblr has a truly massive problem with creepshots; close-up, revealing, and typically non-consensual videos or photos of women. Found around 70 dedicated blogs with a cursory search; one popular post has 53,000+ likes/reblogs. Tumblr is not combating https://motherboard.vice.com/ ... pic.twitter.com/LkyqUxSDt6 Joseph Cox / @josephfcox : I asked Tumblr: - whether this is against their terms (probably) - whether Tumblr is actively removing these blogs (no) They just provided a statement saying they do not condone it, and encourage people to report. Reddit dealt with this in 2012, come on. https://motherboard.vice.com/ ... Joseph Cox / @josephfcox : Many of these creepshots and upskirts videos of girls on Tumblr are teenagers, some perhaps underage. But it's the sheer scale that is crazy—just searching ‘creepshots’ reveals a stream of harassment and sexualized videos of young girls https://motherboard.vice.com/ ... pic.twitter.com/F6ZQlbgjTn Joseph Cox / @josephfcox : Remember, all of this comes after Reddit had a firestorm with creepshots back in 2012. In a cultural shift for the platform, Reddit banned the creepshots sub-reddit. But Tumblr's community is more than alive and well https://motherboard.vice.com/ ... pic.twitter.com/ludV5E9bK8 Joseph Cox / @josephfcox : Tumblr now says it may or may not violate their terms of service, depends on the post (of course). It probably would violate if the post included, say, the subjects Facebook profile or was of a child. That... doesn't seem to address the majority, and which Reddit clamped down Joseph Cox / @josephfcox : One of the Tumblrs we found was specifically focused on Disney World: closeup, revealing and sexualised videos of women and girls, seemingly without consent. Other people are using Tumblr to sell gigabytes of this material, and Tumblr hasn't removed them https://motherboard.vice.com/ ... pic.twitter.com/qFvTGYuGbh Joseph Cox / @josephfcox : What I think is an indication of how seriously Tumblr takes similar issues relative to other Silicon Valley companies: - Child porn and Twitter: Twitter asks for accounts so can remove - YouTube and Nazis: YouTube asks for accounts so can remove - Tumblr and creepshots: nothing
Context & Ripple Effects
Joseph Cox's Motherboard investigation documents that Reddit's famous r/creepshots ban pushed this content to Tumblr rather than off the internet: roughly 70 blogs sharing non-consensual photos of women, one with ~11K followers and posts drawing 53K+ interactions, none removed by the platform, which responds only by encouraging users to report them. Cindy Gallop's framing in the coverage is structural, not incidental — founders who don't experience harassment don't design abuse out of their platforms from the start.
The episode sits at the start of an arc the related coverage traces fully: nine months later Tumblr answered its moderation problem with a blanket ban on all adult content, then spent 2022 partially unwinding it by allowing nudity and sexual themes again while keeping explicit acts off-limits. The Instagram finding that Meta left a man accused of selling photos of children online for months after his arrest shows the same report-driven enforcement gap across companies.
First-order effects
- Women whose photos appear on these blogs have no removal path that doesn't run through individual user reports — Tumblr's only stated action — leaving identified blogs like the 11K-follower account live.
- Tumblr absorbs the reputational cost of being named as creepshots' post-Reddit home, with the investigation handing advertisers and app-store gatekeepers documented evidence rather than anecdote.
Second-order effects
- The investigation feeds the pressure that culminates in Tumblr's December 2018 total adult-content ban — a sledgehammer response that removes consensual adult communities along with the abusive blogs it failed to target directly.
- The parallel Instagram case signals investigators will keep auditing platforms' report queues, forcing each company to either staff proactive enforcement or accept recurring exposés naming it specifically.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, platforms without abuse-resistant design default to moderation pendulums — permissive growth, scandal, blanket prohibition, partial reversal — because targeted enforcement of non-consensual imagery was never built in, exactly the failure Gallop attributes to homogeneous founding teams.
- Sustained investigative pressure pushes non-consensual imagery from a community-standards issue toward a distribution-layer liability question, where platforms answer for what they host rather than merely reacting to reports.
The trend: Platform moderation is lurching between permissive neglect and blanket bans because major social networks still treat non-consensual imagery as a user-report problem rather than something designed against from the start.